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Noura Erakat

The present decade of a “post-American world” (how some scholars call a system of international relations marked by the relative decline of US global influence) has been seeing its share of highly publicized conflicts – Iraq, Afghanistan, Georgia, Egypt, Libya, Thailand, Syria and Ukraine, along the continuous Israeli-Palestinian struggle. The aforementioned one’s have had a limited, thought dominant presence in the public eye, unlike more permanent situations in the “failed” North African states. In relation to them, one of the terms whose resurgence I’ve noticed in Western media’s op-eds and analysis is “useful idiots“. This term is used to refer to western public intellectuals and human rights advocates, critical of their own societies’ cultural intolerance, human rights standards and foreign policies.